And Just Like That… Season 3 Episode 5 Recap: A Woman’s Right to Shoes Redux.
We’re finally back to the Sex & the City/And Just Like That… we know and love/hate. To paraphrase Seema at the prospect of going to Virginia in an earlier episode: Carrie is not a nature girl, she will be enjoying the cocktails. Or her smorgasbord of heels that she jauntily dons to stomp around her townhouse in the episode’s opening montage, a much-needed injection of joie de vivre after being bogged down in the Virginia mud the last couple of episodes.
Carrie being Carrie, she stubbornly won’t take off her heels inside because it’s her “woman’s right”—harkening back to one of my favourite episodes, season six’s “A Woman’s Right to Shoes.”
“I’m one of those writers who sleeps at night and walks in her apartment,” she tells the reclusive British biographer Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake) who decamps from London six months out of the year to write overnight in Carrie’s downstairs apartment and sleep during the day. I’m one of those writers who sleeps at night and sits on her couch in her apartment during the day.
Instead of just Taking. Off. Her. Shoes, which she should be doing anyway after hoofing around the dirty streets of New York (I once got a toenail infection from wearing sandals in the city), she rush orders some runners and insists all visitors stay on them lest she incur the wrath of Duncan.
This includes Miranda, whom she reluctantly invites to stay with her to escape her own AirBnB neighbour problems, including a machete-wielding naked man who plays loud music. At several points throughout the series’ many iterations we’ve seen Carrie and Miranda chafe at one another, usually stemming from Miranda’s judgement and Carrie’s frivolity and at-times frustrating open-heartedness. This time around it’s because of Miranda’s lack of conscientiousness as a houseguest, consuming Carrie’s last yoghurt, banana, and Mexican Coke, to go with the Mexican food that Miranda eats, spills and mops up with Carrie’s scarf on Carrie’s brand new (and hideous) table, the one she agonised over for episodes and which Aidan surprised her with. Her relationship might be on backorder, as she laments in the season opener, but her table isn’t any longer.
Perhaps Carrie having to make room for Miranda inspires her to accommodate downstairs Duncan, whom she finds common ground with as they’re both writers. He confesses he’s nervous about writing about Margaret Thatcher, not least of all because she’s the first woman he’s attempted to chronicle, while Carrie admits she’s also trepidatious about writing historical fiction. In “trying something new” in her writing, she decides to compromise at home, and takes off her heels.
Other things I couldn’t help but wonder about:
The motifs of real estate and sleeplessness appear again, along with cockblocking (or is that clitblocking…?) pets. Shoe interrupted Carrie and Aidan’s phone sex in the first episode (and now she’s keeping her awake by sleeping on her head), while Joy’s “litigious” Italian greyhounds whine at her bedroom door when Miranda sleeps over.
Lisa has a work crush on her new editor, Marion (Mehcad Brooks). Can you blame her?!
Harry is diagnosed with prostate cancer 😢